The Sentence

Like lots of moms, I struggle in the summer with setting limits on video game time. My boys would happily spend their entire vacation with Mario and Lego Indiana Jones.

“Time's up!” I holler downstairs. I’m not surprised when ten minutes later I descend to find them still roaming the galaxy.

“Turn it off. I mean it!” But no one is listening to me. Completely exasperated, I flick off the TV and turn on my Commander Mom voice:

“You’ve. Been. Sentenced.”

Eyes glazed over from too much game time now register a look of horror. Then the wailing begins.

"I just wanted to finish this level."

"John gets to play all day if he wants to."

"You never let us play."

I've heard it all before and I'm calloused. I pry the remotes from their hands. "You need exercise. Sunshine. Your brains are turning to mush."

“No Mom, this IS exercise,” insists my seven-year-old, completely serious. He wiggles his fingers for me. “Look how fast and strong they are!”

That does it. I’m the parent here, and I have to follow through on my threat. I drag them to opposite ends of the kitchen table and place pieces of paper and pencils in front of them. At the top I write “I will listen to my wise and wonderful mother.” Then I number from 1-10. “Don’t get up until you’re finished. And if I can’t read your sentences, you’ll have to write them again.”

A multi-tasker by necessity, I congratulate myself on providing discipline, penmanship practice, and brainwashing all at the same time. At first blush, I know this seems like a terrible idea. Who wants their kids to associate writing with punishment? But experience has shown me that if I get my kids to pick up a pencil for any reason, wonderful things sometimes happen.

I leave them sulking over their pages. I haven’t even finished unloading the dishwasher before I hear the giggling start. Glancing back, I see them sitting side-by-side now, scribbling in the margins. They are engaging in their own form of storytelling, drawing rockets and monsters and laser guns shooting down imaginary planets. They send me rebellious glances from time to time as they continue their conspiratorial creativity.

“Let’s not spend all day,” I say, egging them on.

It takes them two hours to finish their sentences, and by that time most of the paper in the notebook has been used up. They can’t wait to show me the intergalactic war that has just been waged by characters of their own creation. As budding storytellers, they have it all: setting, plot, and darn good sound effects.

I send them outside, and then tuck their pages in a special file. Someday after they’ve won a Pulitzer or the Newbery, I’ll want to remind them what a wise and wonderful mother they have.

Permission Impossible

So. For nearly a month, I’ve sat on some great news. I’ve celebrated in secret. Bit my tongue. Defied near-death limits of squee retention. And yet, despite the personal joy, and the congrats from a select few, what I really couldn’t wait to do was announce my news to the world.

Because I’d just gotten my first big book deal.
Yes, my moment was here.
The world was my oyster.

So, the second I got permission, I sat down to write my squee blog. A page later, I stopped. Deleted. Started again. But the words kept sounding the same:

Me, me, me! La, la, la! I’m so awesome! Yes, I am!

Egads, right? I mean, I’m no awesome writer, just word-hack made good. A stubborn girl who didn’t know when to quit. And this too-cool-for-school kid who appeared on the page just wasn’t me.

Shaken, I soldiered on, but so it went for several weeks. Write. Delete. Write. Delete. Write. Delete. Until I got so fed up that I turned to Lynne.

“This is hard, and I don’t like it. Can you write my squee blog post and pretend you are me?” I said.
“No, you have to write it yourself, dork!”
“Okay, an embroidered, cheetah-print Snuggie, if you just write it for me.”
“What? Is this a blog post bribe?”
“Yes.”
“I can't believe how desperate you are to avoid this. But you realize it shows at the bottom of the post who the author of the post is, right?”

Yes, well, I hate you, and you’re not my friend any more. (Lynne, okay, maybe my brain thought this for a nanosecond, but it’s not true. You’re still my friend and I totally love you. XOXOXO, Mon)

Anyway, since Lynne was dead to me, I was able to forget about the evil post until my agent, Jo called. “So, when are you going to blog...er, celebrate?” she said. Queen of Subtlety, that girl.
“Ugh. I can’t write about my real-life self. It’s all me, me, me, and I sound like a dork.” (I am, actually, a dork, but the irony of this was lost on me at the time.)
“But you have such a funny, natural voice,” she said.
Silence.
“Look, Monica, why don’t you try writing it like a story?”
“Sure, Jo. Neat,” I said, ready to dismiss the idea.

But, as is the way with Jo’s suggestions, it turned out to be a great one. I mean, what was my story? And why was an itty bitty blog post proving so difficult to write?

Several brownies and a few long walks later, I came to a conclusion. The post felt terrible to write because it was dishonest. The ‘me thing’ was a lie. I mean, maybe I typed the words, but it was my friends who read and loved them first. And my hub who supported my unwaveringly. And Jo, who saw the glimmer of potential in little ol’ me.

Truth is, it takes a village to raise a writer.
And maybe all I needed was the proper acknowledgement.

So. To my village—a million, trillion thanks. I owe every bit of my success to you. I love you all to the moon and back!!!

Now, without further ado, the deal:

I’m thrilled to announce that Jo sold me in a four-book, work-for-hire series to Penguin. Due out in summer 2012, this series will follow 7th grade, French Horn player, Holly, as she joins her middle school band and endures all of the drama that comes with being a “band nerd.” Light, fun and funny, with an ensemble cast of very strong, unique characters, the series shows a group of completely different people brought together by a shared love for something. A bit like Glee, for the middle school crowd.

Yeah, pretty dang awesome, if I do say so myself.

Brain Drain

Do you store your ideas in your head instead of on the page? Are you a fanatic about getting it all figured out before tapping on the keyboard, or picking up the pen or pencil? Sometimes that's great, but chances are you'll suffer brain drain and forget one of the main points you wanted to remember.

I used to do that for my picture books until I realized once I started actually writing, more ideas developed than I could possibly create and hold inside my brain. The details, verbs, characters and activities came alive. One time I sat down, planning to write a panda book, and out came a book about an ostrich and a hummingbird. Not exactly what I anticipated. And yet it was so much fun to find flying birds in my head, and they weren't bats in my belfry!

Now when I have an idea, I create a folder for it and put inside a one page document with a title (I usually start that way) and any details I think about for that particular story or article. It can be character names, activities, geographic areas, nutty nuggets of storyline, colors I want to mention, relatives to ridicule or even dog breeds and names. Now when I daydream about my writing I don't suffer brain drain from overloaded wires and circuits!

In fact, sometimes I pull up the document, read it over, and type more on it before I even write one sentence related to the story. So if you brain is drained, strained or mainly on the plain in Spain, type a document to store your ideas and add to it when the creative muse is playing inside your cranium. You'll be glad you did. Just get them on the page! And do it now, before they go outside to play without you!

Smories!

Some fun news for Laura and me this month-- we each have a story on the Smories website, which posts videos of adorable British children reading short stories that writers submitted to the site.

From their submissions, the Smories people take their fifty favorite stories to post on the site for one month, so ours will be up there for the month of June, and fifty new stories will be posted in July.

Starting in August they'll do something different and post a new story each day; see their submission guidelines if you're interested in sending them a short story, and maybe we'll see yours there!

Laura's story is "A Whale of a Rescue," and mine is "The Shell Collector and the Selkie Wife."

Complete coincidence that we each wrote about aquatic creatures.

Do Not Let Your Left Brain Know What Your Right Brain Is Doing

The Rutabaga Festival. How it plagues me. On my work-in-progess, Reasons For Leaving, I got up to chapter 10 without much of a problem. Then somehow, I stalled. I did have to set it aside to do some revisions on Chained, and then I was distracted with the sale and with normal everyday stuff like housecleaning and way too many good books to read. Oh, and a computer virus, daughter's prom, upcoming graduation, etc. That's life, though--everyone's busy, distractions are everywhere, we all get sidetracked and somehow get our work done anyway. But for some reason I keep avoiding writing this next chapter.

When I've had this problem before it's because I wasn't sure what needed to happen next in the story, but in this case, I know what happens. The main character goes to a Rutabaga Festival. That sounds harmless enough, but I literally did not write anything on this book for weeks and weeks. I'm not even sure why I don't want to write this chapter. Is it because I worry it will suck? Likely it will, but it's only the first draft, so that's ok. Maybe I don't want to write the details it will need. Maybe it's a sign that the chapter isn't necessary at all. Still, it's a first draft and I just need to write it. Later I'll take it out or revise it or whatever it needs, but for now I just need to get it onto the page. I keep telling myself that, but it doesn't seem to work.

I imagine my main character knocking on my window and saying, "Helloooooo...remember me? You left me sitting in the car."

To get myself back to the manuscript at least, I decided to skip over that chapter for a while and write the ending. I'd been thinking of the last chapters anyway, so I wanted to get those ideas written down. Also, since there's a mystery in the story, I think it's good to have the ending written so I know where it needs to go. Now the last two chapters are drafted out.

So that's nice. Back to the middle.

If I don't get my left brain out of the way--the part that worries about the chapter organization, that it won't work, that it will be boring--this will never get done. Usually it helps me to set the computer aside and do some freewriting when I'm working on a new chapter or when I feel stuck on a scene. The ideas flow better that way and I'm not tempted to edit so much like I do when I'm on the computer. I've done plenty of freewriting on this chapter now, but when the time comes to write this part of the story, I still end up staring at the blank screen until some other distraction saves me from having to do it.

So I took out my copy of Writing on Both Sides of the Brain by Henriette Anne Klauser, because I remembered it had some great exercises for getting that judgmental left brain out of the way so the right brain can do its work. I turned to the chapter on branching. Unlike linear outlining, branching is a way of organizing ideas from the center of the page outward, and allows for new ideas or details to be added easily. And it uses the whole brain. Klauser explains: "A linear outline is one-sided and left-brained. Branching is multi-faceted and whole-brained. Branching gives a picture an encourages spontaneity (right), at the same time, it provides structure and indicates logic (left)." [pp. 48-49].

I started in the middle of a blank page with the words "Rutabaga Festival," then branched out from there with the different things I might include in the chapter, then branched out further with more details. Now and then I did have to stop my left brain from wanting to take over the whole task. When I drew the branch about food at the festival I thought, "Ooh! I should get online and research rutabaga recipes to get ideas for what they might serve!" Yes, perhaps later, but not right now. Be quiet and keep working. Or on the branch about people: "Careful not to get stereotypical or anything. Just because they're in East Texas doesn't mean they'll see people wearing camouflage or a guy with a belt buckle bigger than his head." Yes, I know you're concerned. We'll take care of that later. "And she probably won't be playing the games or going on the rides when she's there to look for her friend..." Yes, I understand that. Now go away before I start singing Ludacris songs to you again.

So here's what I had after I finished the branching exercise:

I know, it looks like a hot mess, but it's actually really organized, and a lot of ideas are on the paper now. Here's a prettier example I made so it would be easier to share:

Of course, if outlining works for you, keep doing it. But if you're like me and don't like to outline, you may enjoy branching as a way to get ideas on paper and organize your chapter, your to-do list, even your whole book.

After all this, it's possible the chapter won't be in the final manuscript, but now's not the time to decide that; now's the time to write it. But the time spent on it won't have been wasted, because there will be other times I feel stuck and want to avoid writing something, and I'll know that I can work through it. For I have faced the rutabaga.

If it does show up in the final manuscript, and that manuscript is sold and made into a real book, you might read it and think, "That's it? That's what gave her so much trouble? What was so hard about that?!" And that means I will have done a good job, because sometimes it takes a lot of work to make writing look effortless.

So what holds you back from getting your writing done, and what have you done to overcome it?

Aaaaaaannnnnd SOLD!

So if you've been reading our posts, you know by the teasers that the group has been waiting to announce some good news.

For a little over a week I've been bursting with happy news and wasn't sure how much longer I could hold it all in. We even had cupcakes at our WWFC meeting on Tuesday, to celebrate my good news, Chris' birthday, and perhaps some other good news by a Writer To Be Named Later. Still couldn't squee to the world, though, until the deal was official. I was getting worried that I'd find myself unable to take it anymore while in some random place like the grocery store and run up and down the aisles screaming, "Guess what?! Guess what?!" Or that I'd break out in a happy dance with a cubicle chair at work. So thankfully the official announcement is out! Here it is, from today's Publishers Marketplace:

"Lynne Kelly's debut CHAINED, about a boy who works as an elephant keeper in northern India to fulfill a family debt, to Margaret Ferguson at Margaret Ferguson Books, at auction, by Joanna Stampfel-Volpe at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation."

I actually didn't know the news was public until I was checking Twitter while getting my hair done and saw that a couple of people had congratulated me on the book deal. So it was in the hair salon that I finally said publicly, "Hey, guess what?" I managed to stay in my chair, though.

For those who don't know Margaret Ferguson, she's an editor at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, and she'll be releasing books under her own imprint there starting next year. And from what I've heard, completely awesome. The release date for Chained should be sometime in the Spring of 2012.

It's been a fun and exciting time, but now that I'm able to share the news with everyone, it's just now starting to feel real. Yay!

Do the Write Thing for Nashville auction!

Hey people! More posts about WWFC news coming soon, but for today I wanted to let everyone now about an auction where you can win some awesome stuff and support a great cause.

In the "Do the Write Thing for Nashville" auction, you can bid on things like signed books donated by authors and manuscript critiques or phone calls with editors and agents who have donated their time and services. Day one of the auction is open now, and new items will be posted each day. Authors/nice people Victoria Schwab, Myra McEntire, and Amanda Morgan have organized the auction to benefit victims of the recent Nashville-area floods.

So stop by the auction site and place your bids to help Tennessee flood relief efforts, and win something amazing at the same time!